Lesson 7: The English Civil War

Seventy years after Elizabeth’s death, England did something no European state had done: it put its king on public trial and cut off his head. The road from Charles I’s Personal Rule to the scaffold outside Whitehall — and from republic back to monarchy — is the central political drama of the seventeenth century. This lesson covers the causes, course and consequences of the Civil War, and practises the 16-mark judgement question on its causes, with a source that shows how radical the war became.

Timeline and key terms

Divine right — the belief that kings answer to God alone. Ship money — a tax Charles levied nationwide without Parliament, ruled legal only 7–5 in Hampden’s case (1637). Regicide — the killing of a king.

The road to war

Charles I inherited his father’s divine-right convictions and added a talent for alienating everyone he needed. His marriage to the Catholic Henrietta Maria, his promotion of Arminian clergy under Archbishop Laud, and the persecution of Puritans convinced many that popery was advancing by stealth. After quarrels over taxation he dissolved Parliament in 1629 and ruled alone for eleven years, funding the state by reviving old levies — ship money most notoriously — and governing the Church through Laudian uniformity. The scheme collapsed in Scotland, where the imposed prayer book of 1637 provoked riots, a National Covenant, and the Bishops’ Wars. Bankrupt, Charles recalled Parliament in 1640.

The Long Parliament dismantled the Personal Rule: Strafford was attainted and executed, ship money abolished, Laud imprisoned. But when Parliament pressed further — the Grand Remonstrance of December 1641 listed 204 grievances and passed by just 11 votes — trust broke. Charles’s attempted arrest of the Five Members (January 1642), marching into the Commons with soldiers, confirmed every fear of tyranny. The Irish Rebellion of 1641, with its inflated atrocity stories, raised the question neither side could fudge: who would control the army raised to crush it? Through 1642 the country chose sides. On 22 August Charles raised his standard at Nottingham.

War and regicide

The war’s shape owed much to geography and money: Parliament held London, the navy, the customs revenue and the richer south-east; the king held Oxford and the north and west, and fought with élan but chronic shortages. Early royalist success gave way once Parliament professionalised: Marston Moor (1644) lost the king the north, and Fairfax and Cromwell’s New Model Army — centrally paid, promoted by merit, stiffened by religious conviction — destroyed the main royalist army at Naseby in June 1645. Charles surrendered to the Scots in 1646.

Victory dissolved the winning coalition. Parliament’s Presbyterian majority wanted a negotiated settlement and its own church; the Army wanted religious toleration, arrears of pay and a new constitutional order. Charles, negotiating with everyone and sincere with no one, escaped, allied with the Scots, and provoked the Second Civil War of 1648. The Army drew its conclusion: Pride’s Purge (December 1648) expelled moderate MPs, leaving a Rump that tried the king for “tyranny, treason, murder and public enmity”. Charles refused to plead, denying the court’s authority — the century’s neatest statement of the argument the war had been about. He was executed on 30 January 1649 before a silent crowd, reportedly wearing two shirts so that shivering would not be mistaken for fear.

Republic, Cromwell and Restoration

The republic declared in 1649 — England a “Commonwealth” — survived by the sword: Cromwell’s campaigns in Ireland (Drogheda and Wexford, where thousands died and the memory still burns) and Scotland (Dunbar, 1650) secured it. In 1653 Cromwell dissolved the Rump in fury (“In the name of God, go!”) and ruled as Lord Protector from 1653 to 1658: efficient, tolerant by the standards of the age to most Protestants, militarily respected abroad (Jamaica seized 1655), but never able to build a settlement Parliament and Army both accepted. The experiment died with him; in 1660 General Monck marched south and Charles II returned amid general relief.

Charles II reigned entertainingly and carefully, but the final crisis came under his brother James II. The Popish Plot hysteria (1678), the Exclusion Crisis — in which the words Whig and Tory were coined — and the birth of party politics all belonged to Charles’s reign; James’s open Catholicising of the army and state would bring the reckoning of 1688. The years also gave London catastrophe and rebirth: the Great Plague of 1665, the last great visitation, and the Great Fire of September 1666, which destroyed some 80 per cent of the walled city — and made room for Wren’s churches and St Paul’s.

Working with sources — Source A

Source A records the Putney Debates of October–November 1647, when the Army’s rank and file debated England’s future with Cromwell and Ireton. Colonel Thomas Rainsborough argued for votes for all men:

For really, I think that the poorest he that
is in England hath a life to live as the
greatest he; and therefore truly, sir, I think
it is clear, that every man that is to live
under a government ought first by his own
consent to put himself under that government.

Model answer — “How useful is Source A for an enquiry into the ideas debated during the English Revolution?” [8 marks]

Source A is exceptionally useful because of both its content and its provenance. Its content preserves an idea — government by consent of the governed, claimed for “the poorest he” — that would have seemed dangerously radical in 1647 and was centuries ahead of practice. Its provenance makes it rarer still: it is not a printed pamphlet polished for the public but a shorthand record of a closed military debate, so it shows real argument, including the fact that Leveller ideas had penetrated the officer class. It also has limits: Putney was the Army, not England, and the Levellers lost — Ireton’s property-based franchise argument prevailed in the room and all but a fraction of the demands were dropped. But for an enquiry into the ideas the revolution generated, Source A is close to the best evidence we have, precisely because we hear it being thought aloud.

Why this reaches the top level: it judges usefulness against the exact enquiry, uses the unusual provenance (a secret transcript) as positive evidence, and notes the crucial limitation — the idea lost.

Common mistakes

• Charles the villain / Charles the martyr. Both were propaganda positions in 1642. Historians weigh evidence; they do not join sides.
• Narrative instead of causation. In “why did war break out?” questions, sequence is not explanation: link religion, money and Scotland in chains.
• Ignoring the Scots and Irish. This was a war of three kingdoms — Scottish prayer-book riots started the crisis and an Irish rebellion sharpened it.

Exam Experience

Question — “Charles I’s religious policies were the main cause of the English Civil War.” How far do you agree? [16 marks]

Model answer (extract):

Religion supplied the language, the fear and the flashpoints of the crisis, and the case is strong. Laud’s Arminian reforms — altars railed, ceremonies restored, Puritan clergy prosecuted — convinced a generation raised on anti-popery that the court itself was turning Catholic, a fear the queen’s religion made vivid. Twice religion lit the fuse: the Scottish prayer book of 1637 provoked the rebellion that bankrupted the Personal Rule, and the Irish rising of 1641, reported in England as a Catholic massacre of Protestants, made control of an army a question on which neither king nor Parliament dared yield.

Yet religion alone did not cause the war, because England had lived with these tensions since 1629 without fighting. The financial structure mattered: a crown too poor for war had to summon Parliament in 1640, and ship money proved that Charles intended to tax without consent permanently — a constitutional, not merely religious, grievance. Personality mattered too: where James I had blustered and compromised, Charles treated concession as dishonour, from the Five Members to his double negotiations in 1647–48. And events created the war’s moment: without the Scottish Covenanters defeating him twice, Charles could have continued ruling without Parliament indefinitely.

Overall, religion was the main cause in the sense that it made compromise look like betrayal for both sides; but it needed fiscal collapse and Charles’s own rigidity to turn fear into war in 1642.

Marking notes:

• Level 1 (1–4 marks): simple statements — “Charles upset Puritans” — little weighing.
• Level 2 (5–8 marks): developed points on religion supported by detail (Laud, the prayer book).
• Level 3 (9–12 marks): analysis of religion plus other factors (money, personality, Scotland) with a judgement.
• Level 4 (13–16 marks): sustained argument that weighs factors against each other — as the model does by separating what religion explains (fear, intransigence) from what it cannot (timing), reaching a qualified conclusion.

Going further — the transcripts that slept for 240 years

Clarke’s shorthand notes of the Putney Debates were lost to history until 1891, when they were found among his papers in the library of Worcester College, Oxford, and published as the “Clarke Papers”. That rediscovery changed what the Civil War could be about. Before 1891 the war could be narrated as king versus Parliament, cavalier versus roundhead; after it, historians had to reckon with the plain soldiers who demanded, in so many words, a democratic franchise and government by consent — two centuries before Chartism. The lesson generalises: the archive is not the past; it is the past that happened to be written down, kept and found. When you meet a new body of evidence — the Vindolanda tablets, the Clarke Papers, declassified Iraq files — ask first what it allows historians to say that they could not say before.

For Cromwell, the equivalent discipline is to weigh his own record against the memories of those he ruled. His letters after Drogheda (1649) described the killing of some 2,000–3,000 defenders as a “righteous judgement of God”; Irish memory made the town’s name a synonym for massacre for three centuries. Both are evidence — of Cromwell’s providential self-understanding, and of conquest’s human reality — and neither, alone, is the whole event. Mature history writing holds them in the same paragraph.